Here’s one that looks really beautiful, tastes amazing and is super healthy. It also looks harder to make than it is, which is great because you’ll look really smart and cultured wheeling it out.
Going to visit family in France usually means haggling with restaurant owners down from considering tuna as vegan. The food is amazing, obviously, but my god do they love meat. French people are personally offended if you don’t eat meat. So let’s bastardize fancy comfort food with a Paté en Croûte! A layered, meaty, jelly pastry that will feed everyone, and beats the carnivore version by a mile. Enjoy this recipe and remember to play with it once you’ve got the hang of the pastry and jelly.
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Soft, sashimi style seitan with a lovely fishy smoky flavour is here. It takes the whole kitchen cupboard to make but it’s totally worth it. Plus the reviews for supermarket vegan salmon are hit and miss, and I can’t be bothered trying at their prices.
So the basis of this recipe is from a really nice person called Aleksandra who used to be in The Seitan Appreciation Society group on fb. She said people could go wild with sharing and using it, and I don’t think she had a blog to cite – but if there’s a way for me to give more credit, hmu!
Butter chicken is creamy, fruity, spicy goodness, and, growing up in my house, definitely a treat. Despite the name of the dish, it’s actually really easy to veganise. What’s not so easy, though, is taking an aesthetic picture of it that isn’t just another reddish mound on my plate. Take my word for it: it’s worth making – it takes a load of ingredients for an authentic taste but the method is easy.
When you get into the swing of it, seitan is awesome as a cheap and tasty meat substitute that you can put together out of anything you find in you cupboards (if you have gluten). It sounds so complicated, but it’s not that bad – honest. Here’s how to get into it.
Prepare yourself for a world of pain tomorrow by grabbing 3 ingredients today and making delicious hangover croissants.
Ingredients.
Method.
I’ll keep this snappy as we’ve got Die Hard marathons to complete.
Ingredients.
Method.
With Thanksgiving having just passed in the US, I took so much comfort in watching white vegans getting trashed for stating they were having a “cruelty free Thanksgiving” and “nothing had to die to be on my plate”. Yes, Barabara, they did. An entire people did. This mindset sums up the allure of veganism for Liberals and Centrists*: veganism is such an easy and self indulgent form of ‘activism’.
*All-out Nazi vegans are for another day, but the points made in this post can easily be applied to their thinking.
Buying fancy vegan foods and berating people for not doing the same makes you great. Gentrifying swathes of London with expensive hipster-vegan food joints makes you a good person. Your consumerism makes you ethical as opposed to learning to operate under a Capitalist system in the most ethical way you can manage. Before anyone shouts “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism“, well, there are strikes, boycotts, supporting working class people and other ways you can and certainly should dull the edge, if only for now.
When Ben & Jerrys launched a vegan ice cream, I put aside the two facts that a) it was a totally inaccessible price, and b) they get their cake and eat it too – they still profit from industrial milk farming. What’s most egregious about them, is that they use this ‘woke’ facade, this ‘I’m with her’ aesthetic, to sell products while profiting from the occupation of Palestine. They literally make money from apartheid while having ‘Resist’ packaging and a cartoon brown woman on the front. Another buzz in the vegan foodie community is that M&S are offering vegan fake meats and mini burgers this Christmas, a company infamous to me for their involvement with Israeli occupation.
To see people shirking the guilt of Western privilege by buying expensive ‘ethical’ vegan food that completely violates the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement is outrageous, but what do we expect from a country which literally sells arms to Israel?
If you read this and think, well Asda is owned by Walmart and Tesco treats workers badly – sure they do. But this isn’t an ask to live off the grid, it’s an ask to adhere to a very basic boycott, in this case of actually expensive items you can get elsewhere. And if you sincerely are all about the workers, what happened to international solidarity? Look up the stuff IWW do for Palestine.
Despite its numerous atrocities against Palestinian people from the start of its British enforced occupation, Israel itself is consistently lauded as some sort of progressive force in the Middle East, notably due to its platforming of feminism and veganism.
This sustains itself in two ways, which are both rooted in the same logic: Muslims and Palestinians are not people. It’s simple dehumanisation. Firstly, in that Palestinian women are not actually women, they are faceless terrorists or subservient pets, like most Middle Eastern women, which is why Israel is often lauded ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Palestinian women can die, be detained, undergo humiliating checkpoint searches, be kicked out of their homes and suffer every day. They don’t benefit from the famous Israeli ‘feminism’.
Secondly, Palestinians are not considered sentient people worth even the minimum empathy Israelis (for the most part) give to farm animals, let alone the right to basic autonomy. Animals are cute and we love them, Palestinian children, eh, they threw a rock at us so a sniper sorted him out.
It might seem like a tangent, but this brings us to why vegans claiming that the Holocaust and Slavery are comparable to animal farming, are utter dipshits. They are 100% complicit in the dehumanisation of Jewish people, of Black folks and more. Dehumanisation is the key to racism, to apartheid, to many of these struggles.
On most days, I’m Schroedingers vegan. I’ll argue with people who try to hassle me for choosing to be vegan all day. I’ll also argue with vegans that their ethics are meaningless unless they are at least anti-Capitalist. I imagine I’m going to be bags of fun over Christmas dinner.
If you want to still have cute stuff over the holiday, Aldi do Dark Chocolate Lebkuchen hearts, Morrisons do an awesome chocolate Free From ice cream tub and you can get fake meat almost anywhere now. There’s no excuse. Don’t partake in the vegan-washing of apartheid. In fact, go and shop with Zaytoun and other Palestinian shops to support their trade – their herbs make amazing gifts (RISC in Reading sell them), and a Palestine footie shirt would be welcome under my tree tbh.
Macaroni and cheese is pure comfort food deliciousness, and my sauce made out of veggies is mega simple. And mega cheap.
Ingredients.
Method.
Tips:
Squatternutbosh is so so tasty, so so filling, and in some places, so so cheap. So what better way to honour the big hunk of goodness this winter than shoving it in a Jus Rol pastry? This is a really lovely recipe, ideal for a Christmas main or a Sunday night dinner, especially as it’s made best when the fillings left to chill in the fridge for a few hours. Also, you can totally just buy a big bottle of wine, use 20ml for the recipe, and mull the rest.
Food & Revolution 